1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to message control systems, and more particularly to improvements in electronic mail control systems.
Digital communication systems of the "electronic message" or "electronic mail" type are well established. In such systems, several, (often a very large number) of work stations are interconnected by a system which allows users at the work stations to send messages to each other. Such messages are the electronic equivalent of letters and memoranda.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Available prior art addresses the issue of handling mail messages in general. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,745,559 to Willis et al teaches a manner of incrementally increasing or decreasing the content of a local data base; the required communications capacity of the system is reduced by using set identifiers. The system is an information retrieval communication network which is not described as being suitable to handle electronic mail.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,750,135 to Boilen teaches a method of using filter sets or local templates on a stream of data records to obtain user-created reconstituted data records. There is no description therein suggesting that the method is suitable for handling electronic mail.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,713,780 teaches a manner of electronically delivering a document, but no mail sorting mechanism nor method is taught therein.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,745,595 to Muir et al. teaches an electronic mailbox system wherein a plurality of similar data terminals are tied to a telephone line. Any selected one of the data terminals can be made the controlling terminal. However, this prior art system does not teach any filter for the electronic mail messages.
A paper by Chang & Leung, entitled A Knowledge-Based Message Management System, published in Vol. 6, No. 3, July 87 edition of Association for Computing Machinery Transactions discloses a linguistic message filter which can be applied to incoming messages. The filter determines whether to transmit the full text of a screened message or a short alert message, or to store the message for later transmission or processing. There is no mention in the Chang and Leung paper regarding assigning a priority number to incoming messages and presenting the messages without altering them, certainly not in an order and sequence determined by the assigned priority number as in the present invention.
In a typical system which the present invention relates to, there will normally be a standard format defined for such messages (or, often, a number of slightly different formats for different purposes). The format will normally have several fields, including a sender field, a date field, an addressee field, and a message body field; in addition, there will often be further fields, including in particular a "copy-to" field and a "subject" field. The addressee and copy-to fields will often each be capable of holding more than one identifier, so that a message can be sent to several addressees and copied to several more. (The "addressee" and "copy-to" fields are normally functionally equivalent as far as the system is concerned, with the distinction between the two being of significance only to the users.)
In a typical prior art system, when a user generates a message, the system will automatically transmit it to the addressees (including the copy-to's). At each of the stations to which it is sent, it will be stored in a folder (which may well be termed the "in-tray" folder). When the users at that station choose to manually inspect the contents of the in-tray, they will extract the various messages from it one after another, inspect each, and take whatever action they think appropriate, such as deleting the message, printing it out, or storing it in some other folder.
In practice, it is found that such a procedure can become burdensome, because the number of messages which accumulates in the in-tray can become so large that a considerable amount of time and effort is required for the user to work through the accumulation of messages in the in-tray, to manually sort the messages.
This invention provides a method and system which perform an automatic sorting and prioritizing of the messages in the in-tray, so that, for example, the user can deal with those messages of the highest priority first, selectively in their entirety, regardless of the chronological order in which the messages arrived at the user's location.
The object of the present invention is to provide such an improved automatic message sorting and processing system, driven by user created and modified rules, specifically for electronic mail.